US immigration rules blamed for brain drain

Silicon Valley is facing a brain drain of high-achieving foreign-born students, more of who are leaving in the face of a chilly local immigration envi-ronment in a trend experts say will hurt US high-tech industry competitiveness in the long run. A more attractive employment environment over-seas and a bad local economy are increasingly prompting graduates to head home in search of rosier prospects. This is depriving the Valley — often called the cradle of global tech innovation — the fresh blood it needs to remain at the vanguard of hot new industries such as clean technology.

“I believe we are going to innovate our way out of the economic woes we have, and in order to do that you need innovators,” Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat who chairs the immigration subcommittee, said. “It means not sending out people who are innovators who want to become Americans,” said Lofgren, one of the congressional leaders who will meet this week to discuss the matter with president Obama.

More than half the start-ups that emerged from 1995 to 2005 in Silicon Valley — the area near Stanford University in Northern California that spawned the likes of Intel and Apple — had a founder who was a foreign-born national, according to a 2007 study by Duke University professor Vivek Wadhwa. But many foreigners now face a long wait for permanent residence and have come to believe that will never change.

Ken Wilcox, president of Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, said the US now faces an imperative to help talented foreigners stay. “We’re simply not producing, in relative terms, significant numbers of engineers or scientists from people who have already been here for a number of generations,” said Wilcox, who specialises in helping the start-ups that gave his bank its name. “You’ve got to bring them in from the outside.”

Foreign nationals earn half the master’s degrees and 71 per cent of the doctorates in electrical engineering at US universities, according to the House immigration subcommittee. But they are increasingly unlikely to stay. Duke University’s Wadwha said the US lost 100,000 highly educated foreigners over the last 20 years, but faces accelerating losses of 100,000 to 200,000 in the next five years. “The US is experiencing a brain drain and doesn’t even know what that means,” he said.

The combination of better job climates in India and China and seemingly interminable waits for US permanent resident status has changed the calculus for most students, he said. Wadhwa said 60 of the 65 foreign engineers among the 120 he helped train this year to be business executives are leaving for India, China, and Turkey.